With two gigs under our belt, Warlock and I wanted to go into the studio and record four tracks, the obvious choice was to record at The Square where they had the facilities and staff to help. We chose Chris Fallon a particularly good recording engineer and a hardcore reggae fan, I was still undecided with how we wanted to sound but I figured Chris would be a perfect choice. We could only afford to record on 8 track and decided which four songs to record. There was the omnipresent concern with Si's bass playing and I think I even considered doing it myself but the other half of me wanted him to fit in and progress with the band.

March 7th we went into the studio, as mentioned Chris being a reggae fan got me thinking that we could go for a reggae-ish production rather than the obvious punk sound. I never really liked that loud guitars at the expense of the other instruments approach and relied on Chris to do his magic. Warlock had never recorded in the studio but he got the drums down within a couple of takes. Si did good but listening to the playback I realised he only played down strokes on the bass, Chris managed to manipulate the sound so it didn't sound so clunky then I went for my live sound for the guitar. We had the choice of two guitars or backing vocals, we chose backing vocals, however my guitar sounded shitty largely due to my battered amp. We completed the recording in 6 hours and Chris was left to mix it, we got the mix back in a week and my guitar sounded awful. Thankfully there are some great musicians and recording engineers within The Square so I approached Ant Chapman, Collapsed Lung fame, to re-mix it. His opinion was we need to re-record the guitar so we went back into the studio but this time I went for a trebly sharp guitar sound as opposed to a distorted effect. We was happy with the results and decided to release it on cassette titled Punktual Dysfunctional  EP. On reflection it still wasn't the sound we wanted but at least we had a studio recording to send to zines and get gigs. The highlight for me with this demo is the totally insane drum pattern Warlock does on A Town Called Drab, and that's what made him the best drummer I have ever played with. The opening drums on Viva Shoplifting is kind of joke between Warlock and I and relates to an afternoon of listening to reggae intros. England's Atrocities was a song never to be captured correctly in the studio, in the end we dropped the song entirely. Yes I did interpret Lowlife by PiL with the bass line. Fucked If I Know was nearly Fucked In Harlow and represented our earliest material.

We received some good reviews from zines, were we got compared to Sex Pistols, The Cortinas, PiL, Subhumans, Eater, Crass, Flux Of Pink Indians, Zoundz, and Rudimentary Peni all of which I could see elements in some of them artists but otherwise I didn't agree. My favourite slagging was we sounded like "35 year old football hooligans". Over to you Warlock

I have included both versions of the first demo, the 1st mix was never released and the second mix became Punktual Dysfunctional EP

Demo 07.03.1996

England's Atrocities
A Town Called Drab
Viva Shoplifting
Fucked If I Know

Download demo: http://www118.zippyshare.com/v/18STl1O7/file.html

Download Punktual Dysfunctional EP: http://www33.zippyshare.com/v/CxKrZlGT/file.html